The Snowfly (59 page)

Raina ate deep-fried pork rinds, a burger with the works, onion rings, fries, and a wedge of chocolate silk pie, all of this washed down with two bottles of Strohs and three cups of coffee loaded with sugar and Pet milk from a can.

I sipped my beer and watched in amazement.

“I don't eat breakfast,” she said by way of addressing my disbelieving stare.

I offered to drive.

“I do my own driving,” she said. “Get in.”

We eventually got to a village called Trout Creek and veered off on a two-track in the hump of a bend in the road and hustled down the narrow track, throwing white rooster tails. Branches whacked the sides and roof and we glanced off several small trees. I had a premonition of death.

“You get your license out of a Crackerjack box?”

“Same principle as life, keep moving or bog down,” she said, clearly enjoying herself.

We finally stopped at a cul-de-sac carved out of an area of tightly packed hemlocks.

We had no sooner come to a halt than she was out and strapping on her pack. I didn't ask questions; I quickly collected my gear and followed her into the trees. She moved with the grace and speed of a pronghorn.

The river was fast, its flow broken by huge granite boulders. The water flowed heavily and fell over a series of steps to form frothy cataracts and an immense din that drowned all competing sounds. Raina stayed back from the river's edge and trotted sure-footedly along the icy rocks. I followed as best I could.

I smelled wood smoke before we topped a low ridge. On top, under some cedars, there was a line of lean-tos and canvas tents.

Raina entered the camp without hesitation and headed directly to a large tent.

Red Beard and Val stood when we entered.

“So,” Val said. “It's true.”

Raina beamed aloofly.

“We figured it was here,” Red Beard said. “Your presence is proof.”

Raina only smiled.

We ate and drank and talked. There was only one topic: A few white flies had been seen at several locations on the river. The tone was respectful and reverent and, as I listened, I understood that all of these men had walked away from whatever lives they once had to singularly pursue the same myth that had pulled me in starts and stops the better part of my life. I had leaned in and leaned out and only circled the fire, but they had stepped into the flames and had been consumed. Was this my future? It was a disconcerting thought.

We were given a small lean-to near the river. Balsam boughs were piled on the floor for insulation. A sheet of stiff canvas hung down the front as a door and flapped in the gusting wind. The roar of the nearby water was oddly soothing.

Raina unrolled a large sleeping bag.

I started to unroll mine.

She patted her bedroll. “Us,” she said. It was cold. Breath vapor hung in the air. Raina took off her clothes and slithered into the bag.

“Now you,” she said. “Keep your clothes on.”

When I slid in with her, I let my hand graze her buttocks and felt desire leap in me. She jerked in surprise, shifted away, and growled icily, “This is only for warmth.”

But I could still feel the warmth of her flesh in my hand.

 

•••

 

Raina and I slept for three hours before returning to the main tent.

The men had peculiar names. The man with the distinctive beard was Red Beard, for obvious reasons. Foot Long was a former butcher. Numbers had been a CPA. Wheelie had owned Ford dealerships in central Illinois. Silk was a retired army Green Beret. Test Tube had been a pharmacologist for Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor. Funnel had been the
Today Show
's weatherman in the early 1960s. There were others as well, all with similar stories of previous lives in more or less normal jobs and careers, and Val, whom they called Comrade.

“I saw a pair two nights ago and six last night,” Test Tube informed the assembly.

Some had seen none, others had seen more, but there seemed to be general agreement that tonight there would be more white flies. Test Tube gave us a brief lecture on progressions and probabilities. His observations were crisp and clinical, his tone dispassionate. I thought it odd that a man so devoid of emotion would be so obsessed with something as soft as trout and hatches.

“How long you been doing this?” I asked him.

“Full time? Seventeen years. It only counts when it's full time,” he said.

“You quit your job for this?”

Test Tube looked surprised. “Quit? Of course not. It's more in the nature of a sabbatical. When this is done, I'll go back.”

After seventeen years? I had heard once that the half life of a new postdoc was two years, meaning half of what he had learned in almost thirty years in school was obsolete in those twenty-four months. Did he really believe what he was telling me?

Red Beard had been “in,” as they put it, twenty-five years. Foot Long, twenty-one. Val was the newest of the group. I saw no sign of York Gentry and didn't ask about him.

Together the men talked through their tactical plan. The river was the Mibra Onty. The watch would run from one a.m. until an hour or so after sunrise. I asked the reason for this timing and was ignored. Each of us would have an assigned stretch. If a sustained hatch came off, we were to signal the others. I understood: After years of failure on their own, the men had bonded together out of shared obsession and sheer desperation. The myth of strength in numbers.

Only Test Tube seemed calm. The others were restless, antsy, jacked up, and trying to contain their anxiety. They were like grunts setting up a night ambush, their nerves raw and exposed, plugged into the universe at an atomic level where there was only energy begging release.

Raina and I were assigned adjacent positions. I started to assemble my rod when we got to the river, but she stopped me.

“Don't bother,” she said before she walked away.

I thought she was telling me to avoid stringing the rod until I needed it. I took my position above a long, flat slick.

The trick in winter fishing is to dress in layers under your waders and get into the water as quickly as you can. Extremities tend to freeze first, but if you're dressed right the constant temperature of the water stabilizes the lower limit of cold for your lower body. Your upper torso still has to contend with windchill, but half of you is constant. I didn't know what else to do. You take what edge you can get. In winter safety and comfort margins were shaved thin.

Only we didn't get into the water and I felt the chill before my feet went numb. I was not insulated for standing on the bank in snow. I walked around stamping my feet, earning only a periodic and faint tingle, but the outcome was already decided. If I didn't find a way to warm them, my feet would freeze. I gathered dead branches from under the trees and dug down through the snow to pine thatch and deeper yet to find dry material and nursed a small fire to life between some rocks and put my feet over the flames and withdrew into myself. I had met a grunt in Vietnam who said he would write a novel based on where his mind traveled when he was on guard duty. I wondered if he had lived to write his book.

Raina come down to my position after it was light. My back ached from the cold. I offered her a cigarette.

“Coffin nails,” she said. “I quit. I've got too much life left to live.”

Invincible as a child, she remained invincible as a woman.

The men had prepared a huge breakfast of sausages, eggs, and biscuits the weight of sinkers. I was starved, but Raina did not eat. Instead she drank several cups of black coffee. Afterward, the group dispersed. It had started to snow hard.

“I like this,” Raina said, catching flakes on her tongue.

We went back to our tent, burrowed into our bag, and slept again. The heat of her body ignited long-held lust in me, but I had to be content with the warmth our bodies created.

It snowed all day and the wind picked up and blew across the rift where the river cut through the hills. Trees rattled against each other, squealing under the assault, and Raina got out of her sleeping bag and pulled back the flap of the lean-to and stood naked in the face of the wind and looked over at me.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” she said.

 

•••

 

We met the others again after dark. The wind was hard out of the north and it was nearing a whiteout. There was no way to fish in such conditions.

The white fly count from the previous night was assembled. I reported no sightings. Raina reported at least two dozen and four rises. Had she gone after them? No, not time yet, she assured the others. This earned some discussion. Clearly, she was the expert and her words excited them. Flies had been seen above Raina's position, but not below. Tonight all positions would be adjusted upriver. Raina and I would anchor the downstream boundary. I thought it likely we'd all freeze to death before the night was over.

“How are we supposed to see?” I asked them.

They all looked at me.

“White fly, whiteout. How do we see a hatch?” No response. “How do the fish see it? They can't see a hatch in rain.”

As before, they ignored me and went back to talking among themselves. People with obsessions tend to ignore details that don't fit their expectations.

“Eat big,” Raina whispered to me when food was ready.

We repaired to our shelters after the meal, walking past our own twice before we located it. I had to look at my feet to keep my eyes from freezing.

In the bag she turned her back to me. “Conserve energy,” she said. She was breathing evenly and asleep almost immediately.

Queen Anna had always told us that people who slept fast were either all good or all bad. Which was Raina?

“This is crazy,” I told her before we went out to our icy stations around midnight.

“Think of it as part of the allure,” she said.

“I still don't understand how the fish can see a hatch in zero visibility. Or us see the fish.” Much less how a hatch could happen in such extreme weather.

She ignored my remarks. “Let's go.”

I lasted only minutes beside the river, then gave up and climbed uphill into a grove of balsams and cut and piled branches to give me a mattress and air space for insulation. I curled up in the fetal position and slept in fits.

Raina was suddenly there beside me, a ghost poking at me. It was still dark and snowing hard, the wind roaring through the trees like an oncoming locomotive. “Time to go,” she said, shouting to be heard over the wind.

“Is there a hatch?” I looked around. “It's not light yet. What about the hatch?”

She plopped my pack beside me and yelled, “I'm going. You do what you want.”

I grabbed my gear and followed her though the drifting snow. We immediately left the river and veered into the forest. When I caught up to her, she gave me the end of a nylon cord.

“Wrap it around your wrist.” To be heard, she had to put her mouth against my ear and shout. Her breath was hot against my freezing skin. I was too tired and numb to resist. I did as she said and followed like her prisoner. We were tied to each other by shared insanity. Or something. There is no way to describe the effect of a whiteout. Eyes and ears die. Your inner compass spins endlessly, unable to fix. My whole world was in my wrist. Raina led and I followed, the same as it had been when we were children. Queen Anna would scold me: “That girl would tell you to jump off the roof and you'd do it.” I stood mute in the face of such charges. It was true: I had always been mesmerized by Raina. I had no idea how she could see, much less maintain a particular direction. Or keep the pace. I had no choice but to cling desperately to the umbilical.

I was certain we were going to die, but we didn't. Once again Raina brought us through.

In her truck the heater fans blasted us. I was semiconscious. Her headlights made circles in the wall of blowing snow ahead of us. Watching made me dizzy. When I closed my eyes, I slept.

 

•••

 

It was still snowing hard at daybreak, but the wind had died down. We were nosing our way along a narrow two-track, plowing through drifts. The snow fell straight down.

“Where are we?”

She didn't bother to look at me.

She got out of the truck and ran up the road and out of sight. The wipers loudly flicked back and forth, leaving slushy arcs. When she came back, Raina jerked open the door and said we should go.

“It's warm right here.”

She glared at me. “I'm not going to tell you twice.”

“You like getting your way,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I
insist
on it.”

I walked stiff-legged up the drifted lane behind her. The sky was beginning to lighten. We came to a trailer with an unpainted plywood entry shed attached. Somebody had nailed a board to the vestibule and painted
maniac manor
on it. The trailer's interior was cool, but there were space heaters clicking busily and the edge was coming off the air quickly.

“Nice place you've got.”

“It's not mine,” she said. “Let's sleep. We'll worry about food later.”

“Not yours?”

“We're borrowing it,” she said. “Forest Samaritan Rule.”

I thought for a moment. “You mean we're breaking in.”

“You're the wordsmith,” she said. “I need sleep.”

She threw her sleeping bag on a double bed. When I started to get on the bed with her, she squeezed down the opening to the bag. We were standing next to each other.

“I sleep alone,” she declared.

“What about the other nights?”

“Different place, different rules.”

There was the sharp edge to her voice that Punky's used to have, only now the edge was like a razor. I had always backed down when we were children. Not this time.

“We abandoned the others at the river.”

She looked at me and yawned. “We all choose to be where we are.”